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"Identity is widely acknowledged to be a felt experience, yet questions of experience, mood and public sentiments are rarely made central to understanding the global politics of nationalism, citizenship and forms of being together in public. This book asks: what difference does it make to address national identity as an affective force? In a timely intervention, the book addresses the affective and atmospheric dimensions of being together to open new angles in the study of nationalism and global politics. Exploring sites that range from the 2012 London Olympic Games to the European refugee crisis and 'Brexit', asking how the nation is felt in everyday life and differently experienced, Atmospheric Politics moves between theory and narrative to establish a new tone of critical enquiry. Whist informed by critical interrogations of the geographies of "us" and "them", the book argues that these ideas are not as stable as they are made to seem. Drawing on artistic interventions including performance and novels, the book offers a refreshing approach to conceptualising the politics of nationalism, identity and citizenship, and identifies new registers for intervening politically. Overall, Atmospheric Politics outlines other ways of imagining and practising being political together, beyond the exclusionary politics of nationalism"--

Identity is widely acknowledged to be a felt experience, yet questions of atmosphere, mood and public sentiments are rarely made central to understanding the global politics of nationalism. This book asks what difference it makes when we address national identity as principally an affective force? National Affects traces how ideas about 'us and them' take form in ordinary spaces, in ways that are both deeply felt and hardly noticeable, in studies of global events that range from the London 2012 Olympic Games to responses to acts of terror, the European refugee crisis and 'Brexit'. In this timely intervention, Angharad Closs Stephens addresses the affective dimensions of being together to open new angles in the study of nationalism and global politics. She asks how the nation is felt in everyday life, as well as differently experienced, and investigates different forms of enacting being together to generate new insights in the study of national identity. National Affects draws on academic theories in the study of Politics, International Relations and Human Geography, as well as stories, performance works and novels, to establish a new tone of critical enquiry. Informed by longstanding critical interrogations of the politics of 'us and them', this book argues that these ideas are not as stable as they are often made to seem. Drawing on a combination of artistic and academic interventions, this book offers a refreshing approach to conceptualising the politics of nationalism, identity and citizenship. In its focus on everyday atmospheres, it identifies new registers for intervening politically. Overall, National Affects outlines other ways of imagining and practising being political together, beyond the exclusionary politics of nationalism.

"This is a book about the difficulties of thinking and acting politically in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism. It offers a detailed study of how contemporary attempts by theorists of cosmopolitanism, globalism and multiculturalism to go beyond nationalism often reproduce key aspects of a nationalist imaginary. It argues that the challenge of resisting nationalism will require more than a shift in the scale of politics--from the national up to the global, or down to the local--and more than a shift in how we count politics--to an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. In order to avoid the grip of 'nationalist thinking', the book argues that we need to reopen the question of what it means to imagine community. It does so by way of various encounters with urban life. Set against the backdrop of the imaginative geographies of the 'War on Terror', the book shows how critical interventions often work in collaboration with nationalist politics. It claims that a nationalist imaginary includes powerful understandings of freedom, subjectivity, sovereignty and political space/time which must also be placed under question if we want to avoid reproducing ideas about 'us' and 'them'. Drawing on insights from feminist, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as critical approaches to International Relations and Geography, this book presents a unique and refreshing approach to the politics of nationalism."--Page 4 of cover.

This article explores the different ideas of community circulating in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. Specifically, it compares the idea of a community in unity with a more cosmopolitan, urban idea of community. While these two ideas seem to present sharply different responses, the article questions the extent to which the cosmopolitan model offers an alternative to the nationalist idea of community. Drawing on various discussions about how ideas of community are produced through different understandings of time and origins, the article argues that in this specific case both the national and the cosmopolitan accounts of community worked according to a very similar logic, and therefore risked reproducing similar problems and exclusions. Consequently, the article suggests that the task of exploring alternative conceptions of community must involve greater sensitivity to the politics of time and other approaches to the politics of origins. This challenge is pursued through the motif of the city as a site expressing a different temporality and thus a different idea of community from that expressed in traditions of national belonging.

"Collective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces addresses the politics of new forms of collective movements, ranging from anti-austerity protests to migrant struggles and anti-colonial demonstrations. Drawing on examples from various countries, as well as struggles taking place across borders, this book traces the emergence of new practices of being political, described as 'collective movements'. These represent something looser than a common identity - long held as necessary for a political struggle to cohere. They also suggest a different understanding of emancipation to the promise of transformation in time. By addressing various examples of 'collective movements', the chapters in this book examine other ways of being political together, formed through relations carved in cramped spaces or small movements that rearrange our ideas about what is possible. Drawing on the temporary and fleeting nature of many migrants' struggles, the chapters develop concepts and approaches that acknowledge how such mobilisations trouble many standard political sociological categories - including nation, identity, and citizenship. In combining an attentiveness to theories of affect, emotion and atmosphere, they also go beyond a focus on either individuals or collectives, to address the ways bodies are moved by the world and by others. Overall, the chapters propose new questions, methods, and starting points for addressing collective movements in emerging political spaces, and for understanding how what counts as politics is being redrawn on the ground. This book will interest students, researchers and scholars of international political sociology, human geography, international relations, critical security studies, and migration studies"--